Quote from: justusranvier on October 26, 2014, 11:50:16 PM

Quote from: amincd on October 26, 2014, 10:26:34 PM

However, this doesn't address how to create a consensus on the price of bandwidth, so that block generating nodes that generate large blocks can be charged by the protocol for the bandwidth they force all other block generating nodes to pay.

The point is there is no need for global consensus.

I'd have to see more specifically what this thing entails, but I'm extremely leery about an idea that says that a distributed currency doesn't need consensus. My eyebrow raises further when someone suggests a program that can find prices.

Sometimes it's true that nodes don't need consensus concerning transaction chains that don't concern them, but by-and-large it's crucial that any person using the currency can independently verify that any given transaction was valid.

The reason that I proposed introducing the concept of "fuel" was because it makes the transactions, and the storage/bandwidth they require, an economic good upon which market forces can find an appropriate market clearing price. It's "inflationary" because bandwidth and storage space is assumed to also expand over time. If the block size was held low enough by the other miners, that should keep bandwidth from being an issue.

I do not see it as replacing the currency because people do not gravitate toward inflationary currencies when they have a choice.

At the end of the day this is the important point; We are dealing with a Tragedy of the Commons problem, and historically this problem has only ever been satisfactorily resolved by privatizing the resources in question.

Perhaps this means we will always have a somewhat inadequate solution that needs to be hard-forked from time-to-time... But that would be very unfortunate.